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The Saker

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Indymedia Ireland is a volunteer-run non-commercial open publishing website for local and international news, opinion & analysis, press releases and events. Its main objective is to enable the public to participate in reporting and analysis of the news and other important events and aspects of our daily lives and thereby give a voice to people.

offsite link Fraud and mismanagement at University College Cork Thu Aug 28, 2025 18:30 | Calli Morganite
UCC has paid huge sums to a criminal professor
This story is not for republication. I bear responsibility for the things I write. I have read the guidelines and understand that I must not write anything untrue, and I won't.
This is a public interest story about a complete failure of governance and management at UCC.

offsite link Deliberate Design Flaw In ChatGPT-5 Sun Aug 17, 2025 08:04 | Mind Agent
Socratic Dialog Between ChatGPT-5 and Mind Agent Reveals Fatal and Deliberate 'Design by Construction' Flaw
This design flaw in ChatGPT-5's default epistemic mode subverts what the much touted ChatGPT-5 can do... so long as the flaw is not tickled, any usage should be fine---The epistemological question is: how would anyone in the public, includes you reading this (since no one is all knowing), in an unfamiliar domain know whether or not the flaw has been tickled when seeking information or understanding of a domain without prior knowledge of that domain???!

This analysis is a pretty unique and significant contribution to the space of empirical evaluation of LLMs that exist in AI public world... at least thus far, as far as I am aware! For what it's worth--as if anyone in the ChatGPT universe cares as they pile up on using the "PhD level scholar in your pocket".

According to GPT-5, and according to my tests, this flaw exists in all LLMs... What is revealing is the deduction GPT-5 made: Why ?design choice? starts looking like ?deliberate flaw?.

People are paying $200 a month to not just ChatGPT, but all major LLMs have similar Pro pricing! I bet they, like the normal user of free ChatGPT, stay in LLM's default mode where the flaw manifests itself. As it did in this evaluation.

offsite link AI Reach: Gemini Reasoning Question of God Sat Aug 02, 2025 20:00 | Mind Agent
Evaluating Semantic Reasoning Capability of AI Chatbot on Ontologically Deep Abstract (bias neutral) Thought
I have been evaluating AI Chatbot agents for their epistemic limits over the past two months, and have tested all major AI Agents, ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, Perplexity, and DeepSeek, for their epistemic limits and their negative impact as information gate-keepers.... Today I decided to test for how AI could be the boon for humanity in other positive areas, such as in completely abstract realms, such as metaphysical thought. Meaning, I wanted to test the LLMs for Positives beyond what most researchers benchmark these for, or have expressed in the approx. 2500 Turing tests in Humanity?s Last Exam.. And I chose as my first candidate, Google DeepMind's Gemini as I had not evaluated it before on anything.

offsite link Israeli Human Rights Group B'Tselem finally Admits It is Genocide releasing Our Genocide report Fri Aug 01, 2025 23:54 | 1 of indy
We have all known it for over 2 years that it is a genocide in Gaza
Israeli human rights group B'Tselem has finally admitted what everyone else outside Israel has known for two years is that the Israeli state is carrying out a genocide in Gaza

Western governments like the USA are complicit in it as they have been supplying the huge bombs and missiles used by Israel and dropped on innocent civilians in Gaza. One phone call from the USA regime could have ended it at any point. However many other countries are complicity with their tacit approval and neighboring Arab countries have been pretty spinless too in their support

With the release of this report titled: Our Genocide -there is a good chance this will make it okay for more people within Israel itself to speak out and do something about it despite the fact that many there are actually in support of the Gaza

offsite link China?s CITY WIDE CASH SEIZURES Begin ? ATMs Frozen, Digital Yuan FORCED Overnight Wed Jul 30, 2025 21:40 | 1 of indy
This story is unverified but it is very instructive of what will happen when cash is removed
THIS STORY IS UNVERIFIED BUT PLEASE WATCH THE VIDEO OR READ THE TRANSCRIPT AS IT GIVES AN VERY GOOD IDEA OF WHAT A CASHLESS SOCIETY WILL LOOK LIKE. And it ain't pretty

A single video report has come out of China claiming China's biggest cities are now cashless, not by choice, but by force. The report goes on to claim ATMs have gone dark, vaults are being emptied. And overnight (July 20 into 21), the digital yuan is the only currency allowed.

The Saker >>

Public Inquiry
Interested in maladministration. Estd. 2005

offsite link RTEs Sarah McInerney ? Fianna Fail?supporter? Anthony

offsite link Joe Duffy is dishonest and untrustworthy Anthony

offsite link Robert Watt complaint: Time for decision by SIPO Anthony

offsite link RTE in breach of its own editorial principles Anthony

offsite link Waiting for SIPO Anthony

Public Inquiry >>

Lockdown Skeptics

The Daily Sceptic

offsite link Watch: Boris Defends the Boriswave Thu Sep 25, 2025 14:10 | Will Jones
To add to Kemi Badenoch's woes, Boris Johnson has popped up to defend his massive 'Boriswave' of immigration, asking "Who do you want to kick out?" It's not helping, Boris.
The post Watch: Boris Defends the Boriswave appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link Richard Dawkins: ?Trans Women Are Women? Slogan is Scientifically False Thu Sep 25, 2025 11:17 | Will Jones
The slogan 'trans women are women' is scientifically false and harms the rights of women,?Richard Dawkins?has said in a new book warning that scientific truth must prevail over "personal feelings".
The post Richard Dawkins: ‘Trans Women Are Women’ Slogan is Scientifically False appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link A New Definition of Freedom of Speech: An Unsackable Late Night Host Thu Sep 25, 2025 09:00 | James Alexander
From liberal America, the people who brought you Covid and climate censorship and the assassination of Charlie Kirk, we have a new definition of free speech: the unsackable late night host, says Prof James Alexander.
The post A New Definition of Freedom of Speech: An Unsackable Late Night Host appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link How Quakers Are Funding Open Borders Thu Sep 25, 2025 07:00 | Charlotte Gill
Quaker foundations pour millions into organisations promoting open borders, interfering in our democracy and undermining voters' clear wish for security. Charlotte Gill investigates.
The post How Quakers Are Funding Open Borders appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link News Round-Up Thu Sep 25, 2025 00:46 | Richard Eldred
A summary of the most interesting stories in the past 24 hours that challenge the prevailing orthodoxy about the ?climate emergency?, public health ?crises? and the supposed moral defects of Western civilisation.
The post News Round-Up appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Lockdown Skeptics >>

Mr Kenny: Sexual abuse of children is NOT "human nature"

category national | public consultation / irish social forum | news report author Monday February 10, 2014 15:58author by Grace L - Centre For the Study of Women in Society Report this post to the editors

Ireland's failure to protect Louisa O'Keefe & countless others is not about "human nature":
The institutionalized abuse of children is a social ill, the holdover of a long dark age, from which society is only just awakening.

Mr Kenny: Sexual abuse of children is NOT "human nature"
Discussing Louisa O'Keefe's victory in the European Court, Taoiseach Enda Kenny called child abuse "human nature"

Last week, RTE Radio broadcast Taoiseach Endy Kenny's refusal to give assurances that sexual abuse of children by teachers won't continue, citing "human nature" as the reason.

Yet, after publication of the SAVI report ** (Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland), 12 years ago, "wipespread" molestation of students had less to do with human nature than with the nature of government.
In fact, "...the State had direct knowledge of widespread sexual abuse of children from at least the 1930s..." The State's inaction meant it knowingly permitted the sexual abuse of children to continue unchecked, with impunity.

It is no news to reserchers and activists in this issue, that countless children's natural cries for help were cynically repulsed for decades by an adult conspiracy of silence in church, school, (and sometimes even in parents); structured to conceal these crimes, and to mould children into ideal prey.

It is a truism among feminists that sexual violence is a learned behaviour. Much work, however, remains to be done in addressing the exact nature of that learning process; as well as developing strategies for how that process can be effectively dismantled.

Sexual violence is, at this juncture, a deeply-rooted cultural tradition around the world. Educational programs at the high school and college levels, while certainly necessary, are often confronting youth whose indoctrination in the secret handshakes of sexual abuse has already been long ingrained. Even the important work of confronting and changing institutions is only the tip of the iceberg.

A society based on child exploitation
Child abuse statistics in general, when viewed in the historical context of European marriage customs, should make it abundantly clear: sexual abuse of children and youth is not an unusual aberration in our society. We are only now just emerging from a long dark age in which society has been based on the sexual exploitation of children.

The buying and selling of youth into marriage to the highest bidder, as sexual slaves with no say in the choice of their life partner, was largely the norm in Europe until the 17th century, and had not died out completely by the 20th. In other parts of the world, these practices, and worse, still shamefully thrive. Even where slaves have been technically “freed”, the “tall white mansions and little shacks,” the structural power relationships, tend to hang on unchanged.

It is a system with two massively crippling consequences for society as a whole, even above and beyond the holocaust of individual suffering: First, a social structure in which the only sex that's prohibited is consensual. Where sex is a commodity distributed according to wealth; and where the natural unfolding of healthy youthful sexuality is brutally interrupted and perverted to serve adult agendas.

It is characteristic of such systems to trivialize the sexual feelings and preferences of victims, while deifying those of the exploiter: a mentality we may hear rearing its ugly head in the present debate.

Despite children’s vast capacity to accept and even idealize the worst experiences, to be raped, exploited or seduced by the very adults they must look up to for their basic concepts of good, bad, right, wrong, true and false, is a blow to the budding sense of natural justice common to all rational beings. At a tender age it can bring down the moral threshold to the abysmal low where “anything goes.”

Multiplied by the number of adults abused as children, now and in the future running our world, the damage to our moral progress toward a more just society is profoundly undermined.

When we hear today of the most heinous atrocities (the details of which the reader will be spared here,) carried out by those mysterious death squads roaming the Third World these days, one inevitably asks oneself: Who could they get to do these things? How could they get anyone to do this? Only one answer is possible: they had to get these people as children. (Born out by the astonishing percentage of soldiers, currently forced to serve in the world’s most savage conflicts, at the age of ten and even younger.)

We are only now regaining our in-born consciousness that espousification of children is an unnatural crime, because it violates the most fundamental natural justice. Children need adults to take care of them. They can’t be expected to look after adult needs: adults are too big and children too small for that. That’s not fair.

And as anyone who has followed either the church abuse scandal or child labor issues knows, the excessive burdens of adult exploitation can be fatal to children. Intercourse, with its dangers of disease and pregnancy is at all times a grave health risk. (And every pregnancy endangers a woman’s life.)

This is not the only way of organizing human sexuality. Beyond that Dark Age can be found survivals of healthier traditions; often in indigenous societies, or in pre-Roman systems such as the Brehon laws.

A new approach is needed
All that said, imprisonment is certainly a failed paradigm for dealing with sexual exploitation of children and youth. Not because abuse is "human nature," but because of society's long war on sexual choice for all.
Human sexual drive cannot be legislated away, but only understood, and accommodated with proper respect for the basic human needs of all: not only those of a priveleged few. Otherwise, unbridled abuse of one class or gender or age group by another is the result.
Without sweeping changes in our approach to the problem, adults will continue to exploit youth because they can, in a social landscape which raises more barriers than bridges to consensual relations with other adults. And youth will submit to be exploited, sometimes even without force or intimidation, because grown-ups can persuade them to, and if this is the only source of sex education their elders will offer them.

Public education programs, such as we've recently seen in driver safety and drinking issues, and including comparably well-produced, deeply affecting and high-exposure television spots, might go much further toward preserving youth's sexual health than any threat of imprisonment has ever done.

We must navigate the jungle of hysterical emotion, superstitious hypocrisy and cynical tittering to address the sexual health of society as a whole. We need to talk about these issues until we can do so without blushing and stammering. We need to discuss them with other adults. We need to become educated, and provide education, about how to discuss them with children, so as to serve their needs, rather than ours.

Which will be impossible until our general sexual health affords us the equilibrium to consider something other than pressing, unfulfilled needs of our own, for just a moment.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

** SAVI Report found that 1 in 5 women (20.4 per cent) reported contact sexual abuse in childhood and 1 in 10 reported non-contact sexual abuse. More than 1 in 20 women (5.6 per cent) – over 110,000 – were raped as children; 1 in 6 men (16.2 per cent) reported sexual abuse in childhood, 1 in 14 reported non-contact abuse; 2.7 per cent of all men were subjected to penetrative sex (anal or oral sex) in childhood.

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